The Exchange is a fiction novel Xavier "Savvy" Kowalski, one of the most promising American chess prodigies and rumored up-and-comer for the international fame as a potential challenger for the world chess crown. After he loses the junior world chess championship in Venice, Italy, he retires to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he hopes to start his life over. Savvy's father and the chess world at large conspire against him and he finds himself returning to competitive chess again after three years away. He assembles a new team to train him for a return to the world championship, and he also falls in love with a young prodigy he met during his retirement. Together they travel the United States and Europe as Savvy attempts to win back his reputation as America's premier chess player while encountering various rivals, including his own father. The story culminates with Savvy's final championship game, and with his dad.

The goal of this dissertation is to contribute in three ways to the literature on son preference and fertility through a comparative perspective. First, I examine the impact of son preference on fertility in China and South Korea compared with the United States. The impact that a female birth has on the likelihood of a woman having another birth is of the most concern: Women who have one or two daughter(s) as previous child(ren) are expected to be more likely to experience the hazard of having a second or a third birth. Second, my dissertation attempts to examine the effects of women’s status on son preference if women’s education reduces son preference. Third, my dissertation examines son preference and fertility in the U.S. Even though the U.S. has never shown son preference regarding sex ratios at birth, recent research has shown this association to exist among poor Hispanics. My dissertation used data from a national sample, 2002 National Survey of Family Growth. The results showed that women in China and South Korea who had a daughter instead of a son as their first child had a higher hazard of having a second birth as expected. Moreover, the results showed that the hazard ratio of having a third birth for Chinese and South Korean women was almost four and five times more, respectively. As expected, the hazard ratios for the U.S. were not significant and thus did not support the hypothesis. And the more educated women who had a daughter(s) instead of a son(s) as their previous child(ren) were less likely to have a second birth, but not in the third birth. This means women’s education apparently does not reduce son preference in the case of the third birth. Thus, women’s education apparently has limited or no influence on the childbearing decision where son preference is strong. Third, Hispanic women with low socioeconomic status did not have a significant hazard ratio of having a higher order birth. Accordingly, the dissertation does not find any statistical evidence of American son preference at the national level.

The famous article, Son of Human Being, authored by Lu Chiou shows the history of the author¡¦s life, and explores the deep meaning of life and its significance. This thesis is to investigate the writing style and meaning of Son of Human Being, rather then the author himself. The focus of this thesis is on the meaning of the article, which is accompanied with the writing style. The research approach adopted in this thesis is based on the theory of reader-response, as Wolfgang Iser¡¦s theory, how to explain the meaning of an article to reader. According to such theory, the interaction between an article and its readers is the critical issue to judge the affirmation of the article¡¦s meaning. Therefore, the inconclusive and blank parts of the article need to be reified by reader himself/herself in order to make the consistence throughout the whole story in the article. Regarding the writing style, this thesis analyzed the structure of Son of Human Being. The purpose is to investigate the meaning embedded within this article, which is also the motivation to performance this thesis. The embedded meaning consists of surface meaning and significant meaning, where the former is explicit in the content of the article, and the later is implicit. The significant meaning can be obtained by the moral-philosophical, psychological, mythological, archetypal, folklore, or archetypal pattern approaches to analyzing the detailed content of the article. In this thesis, the structure of Son of Human Being is organized as one chapter. The four phases of life described in the article are Life Regret, Wiseness Initialization, Mind Growth, and Eternity, each of which is presented by an individual chapter. Finally, the last chapter draws the conclusion of this thesis.

Thèse de doctorat--Signal et images--Paris--ENST, 2006. / En appendice, un article en anglais. Bibliogr. p. 147-151. Résumé en français et en anglais.

Thèse doctorat : Génie Civil : Villeurbanne, INSA : 2005. / Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. Bibliogr. p. 229-234.

Reproduction de : Thèse de doctorat : Sciences cognitives. Linguistique : Lyon 2 : 2005. / Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. Bibliogr.

Sectorization is a well-established method of increasing the capacity of telecommunicationnetworks. With modern Active Antenna Systems (AAS) comes the abilityto change sectorization order dynamically, both in horizontal and vertical plane.The purpose of this thesis is to investigate when (and what type of) sectorizationis benficial. A theoretical analysis as well as simulations are performed in orderto determine which quantities to look at when making the decision to apply sectorization.Based on the conclusions from these investigations, a self-optimizingalgorithm that only turns on sectorization when it increases network performanceis developed and evaluated. It is shown that large gains can be achieved by onlyturning on sectorization when the right conditions are met. Further, we show thatadditional gains can be seen if antenna parameters such as downtilt and distributionof transmission power between sectors are set properly. Self-optimizingalgorithms for tuning of these parameters are developed and evaluated as well.NyckelordKeywords

Th.--Paris--ENST, 1988. / Bibliogr. p. 167-182.

Th. doct.--Signal et images--Paris--ENST, 1994. / Bibliogr. p. 107-119. Résumé en français et en anglais.

Thesis (M.C.S.)--Regent College, 1988. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 208-224).